It's True: Your Desk Job Is Making You Snack More

I once followed a precise schedule for snacking throughout the work day: breakfast at 7:30 a.m., morning snack at 11 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m., afternoon snack at 4 p.m.. It was a reliable system I created under the belief that I needed snacks to stabilize metabolism and prevent energy crashes. I packed healthy snacks like fruit and had a desk drawer overflowing with packs of trail mix, kale chips, and Kind bars.

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This hefty personal supply, however, didn't stop me from digging into the office's stash as I pleased. Our team always stocked our startup office with an endless supply of munchies: peanut butter packets and apples, hummus and pretzels, cookies, crackers, and dried fruit, and it seemed half an hour couldn't pass without one of my coworkers walking up to our shelf of goods. I sat about five steps away from the snack pile and will admit when I wasn't paying it a visit, I found my eyes wandering there thinking about my next opportunity.

Things changed after I went freelance and went from spending nearly 50 hours in an office weekly to spending 24/7 at home. I kept myself as busy as I would be in an office, but without that drawer of snacks, the communal snack stash, nor the structure of a typical work day, I somehow eliminated snacking from my day completely. That urgency to stick to my snacking schedule–even when I was probably not hungry–suddenly disappeared, and I realized how being in an office really confused my hunger cues. "If you aren't used to paying attention to your internal signals of hunger, fullness, and satisfaction, the sight or sound of other people snacking might cue you to grab something, whether or not you are physically hungry," dietitian Jenna Hollenstein explained to me. Below, Hollenstein and other health experts explain why snacking is so prevalent in the workplace—and what you can do to stop it from getting out of control.

Socializing with coworkers

"Seeing, smelling, hearing, or imagining the taste and texture of food can cause us to want to eat too," says Hollenstein, who in addition to being a dietitian is also a certified intuitive eating counselor. She emphasizes understanding hunger cues and the different internal factors (grumbling in the stomach, a headache and lack of focus) and external factors (seeing coworkers sharing donuts) that tell us we're hungry. That explains the pull I felt toward the snack pile whenever I saw a coworker get up to grab something.

"I work with a lot of millennials working at startups in San Francisco, so a lot of them are getting food around the clock. In that culture, time kind of fades away. You're not taking time to communicate with your body as much," psychologist Juli Fraga said. "It's fun, it's exciting, so you're kind of going along. You certainly want to fit in with what everyone in the workplace is doing." A 2012 survey by Survey Sampling International for Medi-Weightloss Clinics supports Fraga's claim. Among 325 professionals on a diet who participated, 29% said colleagues influenced them to eat more, and 51% said they veered off their diets because they "want to eat like everyone else and be part of the crowd."

"Snacks make the office more fun and comfortable," Tanya Menendez, co-founder of manufacturing startup Maker's Row, explained. That company caught my eye while perusing job postings on LinkedIn because they advertised snacks among their standout job perks right beside vacation days and stock options. "We are more than a company, we are a family. We like the office to be comfortable so people are free to be creative. [Snacking] is also a bonding experience and creates more serendipitous moments where you have a mini catch-up in the kitchen while snacking on chips or hummus," she continued. This attitude toward snacking is common among startups to encourage not only socialization but to keep employees' needs taken care of in-house according to Fraga.

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Stress–you're looking for a break

Food is often a way to boost morale not only among coworkers but for yourself. Whenever I felt overwhelmed with work, I'd open my snack drawer looking for refuge, a few minutes to stop focusing on work. Nicholas Frye, behavioral specialist at Medifast explained this phenomenon, "We eat in anticipation of receiving pleasure. Food is very pleasurable, the taste of it, the smell of it, the texture of it, how it feels in our hand, how it looks, that fires off dopamine," he said, adding "It goes back to that old joke of being on the 'see food' diet–I see food and I eat it. There's a biological basis behind that called the Hedonic Reward System and it's based on the availability of food in our environment."

This was also explored in a 2006 study published by the International Journal of Obesity, which revolved around the consumption of chocolate among 40 secretaries that concluded environmental cues, like proximity and visibility of food, increases intake of food. Google did a similar snacking study in 2013 investigating why employees were consuming too much of the free chocolate and, in turn, possibly hindering productivity. Their internal behavioral science specialists decided to keep the chocolate in opaque jars and resulted in a decreased consumption equivalent to nine vending machine-sized packages of M&Ms per 2,000 employees.

Aside from external influencers, there are internal ones at play, too. "We need to realize food is very rewarding," psychologist Jenny Taitz said. "We get a break from work and we get to eat something that may taste good. People may feel socially anxious and use food as a way to distract from their anxiety." Taitz added that willpower in the workplace gets broken down. "We devote all our efforts to finishing a dreaded task and then feel like our impulse control is depleted by the time we see muffins," she said.

In an office, we also seek comfort from stress in the structure of a 9-to-5. We fall into patterns not only with work, but with eating. This is why it became routine for me to designate snacks for certain hours of the day. "I work from home one day a week and my eating is totally different on that day than when I'm in the office," Frye said, relating to my snack schedule. "We as human beings like structure. We like routine. We like rituals because they're pro social and really helpful for our mental health to have things we can depend upon."

I'm back in a Monday to Friday desk job now, but I've maintained the eating habits I had when I was freelance–no more snack schedule. No more zombie-like mindless munching. Now, coworkers' offerings of cupcakes, donuts, and cake are inevitable. But, I'm more aware of the forces that lead me to these treats and, in a way, that consciousness to indulge makes me enjoy every bite of a snack even more.

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